


something in your magnetism must have pissed them off

by irisesandlilies



Series: stuck on the puzzle [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame Fix-It, Canon Compliant, Fix-It, Happy Ending, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, brief internalized homophobia, imposter!steve, is it suicide if you kill an old man pretending to be you?, vague mentions of catholic steve rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:47:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28654464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisesandlilies/pseuds/irisesandlilies
Summary: Now, he’s killed a creature that wears his own face with bare hands.I don't know if I'm worth all this, Steve.It was all worth it for Bucky Barnes.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: stuck on the puzzle [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2099985
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	something in your magnetism must have pissed them off

**Author's Note:**

> keeping with my alex turner titles, the title is from [stuck on the puzzle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKvzHBdcAdM&list=OLAK5uy_nJYbbASdrxf8XPg_yvsZ1vWugvNgPwv8g&index=5&ab_channel=AlexTurner-Topic), which i’ve aptly named the whole series <3 
> 
> unbeta'd so let me know if you catch any glaring errors

“I want you to be happy.” Bucky props himself up with palms squaring Steve’s shoulders, his hair hangs around his soft face which is folded into something so stern, earnest even. 

An incredulous exhale from Steve brings forth a frown. 

“I am happy.” 

That’s not true, not really. Not with everything he had to lose to get here. Not with the gaping absence of Natasha in his chest. But he’s happy in the context Bucky asks of, some ache is soothed, a terrible pain that settled behind his sternum when the world crumbled to dust is finally alleviated when Steve reaches for Bucky, catches him in a way he had failed at repeatedly before.

He closes his fingers around Bucky’s forearm, taps his thumb lightly against the outer corner of Bucky’s wrist, a well-worn pattern he and Bucky had learned with flashlights in pillow forts a century earlier. Two taps, twelve more-

“Steve.” 

-Ten more. 

“Shut up, Buck.” It’s soft, nearly lost at the seam of Bucky’s lips, “just shut up, okay?” 

Steve pushes upward and kisses him hard, presses against all the places he’s made tender since getting him back. 

“Yeah.” Bucky sighs in an indication of surrender, sags against Steve’s chest and adorns his bottom lip with a second gentle kiss, “yeah, okay.”

He can feel Bucky’s heart pound against his skin, knocking against his ribs and seeking passage. _God_ , how he’s missed it. 

“Can’t get rid of me that easy.” 

It’s a worn conversation, exhausted with each reunion. Bucky insists that Steve doesn’t settle, in a shabby tenement in Brooklyn, hushed in muddy tents, pleading in Wakanda. Begs him not to retire his options when he has a chance at a _normal_ life. Steve’s lines in the tired play always read similar to indignant because it seems increasingly evident that Bucky Barnes is too dense to understand that he is the force that propels Steve Rogers from existing to living. That Steve will never stop chasing him through time until he’s caught him and holding him close. 

Now, nearly a century of loss and gain later, the sentiment seems to finally erode Bucky’s defiance, his misplaced hopes for Steve, and he gives over to the truth Steve has been telling for years. Bucky is _his family, his stability._ No one could ever mold themselves into the role the way Bucky could. No one fit him the way Bucky did. Years of wiping away blood and replacing those stains with soft kisses had left Steve perfectly etched in Bucky’s name. No one could compare, no matter their effort. 

A delicately sincere expression plagues Bucky’s face, creases his forehead. “Five seconds?”

“Just five seconds.” Into the crook of Bucky’s neck he asserts his affections, “I think you might be an idiot, Barnes. What do I always tell you?” 

Bucky’s laughter settles with the freckles on Steve’s shoulder, like he’s always belonged there. He has.

***

He owes the universe this. His relationship with the universe is tenuous, a difficult and painful history that had begun even before his birth. He reasons that because the cosmic forces that be had returned Bucky, he had to return the stones. Steve would always be plagued by obligation.

When that logic isn’t quite enough, he decides that his reverse exploration through time will allow him to correct the failures that still haunt him today. A glowing opportunity to sever the heads of Hydra two years early, push even further back and save Bucky from their evils altogether. If the prominent points of Steve’s life were to be mapped as proof of anything, it was that he would never, _never_ deny an opportunity to affirm his undying affection for Bucky Barnes. 

So it goes, he assumes his place on the platform, the whole affair punctuated by an uneasy air. 

There’s an odd sense of finality to the words he and Bucky exchange and Steve shouts wordless prayers, a litany of pleas, begging that the feeling only indicates an end to the dreadful chapter that has shaped the last five years. 

“Alright. We'll meet you back here, okay?”

“You bet.”

Somewhere in the margins of those words is a vow to Bucky. 

A countdown, a deep breath, and-

***

Steve wakes a second time.

The first waking had been punctuated by fluttering linen and poorly crafted lies. At least he had been eased into, at least there was an attempt to thaw him gently instead of tossing him into the blistering new century. 

The second waking is like a fingertip pressed into a bruise, hard, to see if there’s any pain left to feel in a body that has given everything. An ache that lingers somewhere between his head and his stomach. A feeling that batters around in his ribcage, fighting to free itself. There’s a roaring in his ears, an echo of screams that have been punched from his lungs in every reality. 

His fingers flex listlessly at the grit beneath him, his fingertips catching on wet sand that clings like there’s a magnetism to his palms. The heels of his boots scrape against the slope of the earth, struggling for traction. He anchors his palms and tries to push himself into a sitting position, squinting into the pain he can’t place physically. His stomach protests at the attempt and he tilts his head as bile claws at his throat. He wretches into the sand, his insides churning as though his organs are desperately trying to rearrange themselves, assume positions that make him whole, lessen the ache storming through his veins. 

He raises a trembling arm to his face, dragging his sour mouth across the canvas of his sleeve. It’s soaked. He tries again to pull himself upright. A torrent surges through him in a way he thought he’d abandoned in a lab in Brooklyn, seizing in his lungs and weaving forcibly through his ribs. Like the creature slamming at the walls of his chest is finally vying for freedom. He sputters and wretches again, flattening his palm against his mouth. 

The suit clings to the lines of his frame. Beyond his boots fighting against the bank of the river, the silhouette of the city reaches towards him across the water. 

Understanding his surroundings, understanding the absence of the Triskelion in the skyline tugs at his thoughts, derails him.

Steve swallows dryly, a weight knots around his heart and pulls it down into the depths of him, beyond his reach. A descent that mimics the feeling that had crept towards him as his name carried through battle, the fear clinging to margins of Bucky’s voice before Steve lost him again, nothing but dust. 

Something is wrong. _Something is wrong._

Steve Rogers has been dragged onto the banks of the Potomac River a second time. The place where the new century finally made sense. Where he gained purpose again. Where he knew Bucky was still in the soldier somewhere and still loved him back.

***

The stones are gone, Mjolnir is gone, Steve’s last thread of sanity is quickly thinning, but the safe house is exactly as he’d left it.

And _God_ , it’s a second punch in the gut, a blade across an already existing bruise because the last time he’d been here it had been with Natasha. She had held a presence that demanded the space to bend around her, keep the memory of her in the wallpaper and floorboards even after she was gone. 

He can still smell the acrid bleach that had followed a path from her cropped hair and down the drain. The tilt of her elegant head and quirk of her brow _“Are we twins now?”_ The echo of his laughter in the space feels so raw now. 

She had been his first friend in this century, she had loved him in pieces and loved him whole, and she had fought for him and fought for Bucky when so few others would. She had looked at the love he and Bucky shared and held it in her hands and vowed to protect it, because she was a good person and she was a friend. She was family. 

Wherever he is now, regardless of what happened to the stones and his objective, the loss of her doesn’t hurt any less. 

All he knows is loss, written into the architecture of his own body. A former self died screaming to lay the foundation for the pawn he would become. He knows loss as a grip that comes up short and fading into a white abyss. He knows loss every time he looks to that hand, looks to his broad chest that feels too big for a heart that is seizing and shrinking. And now he knows it in this shabby apartment in D.C., having just woken up with nothing and no clues to point him back home. 

He starts his search by changing out of the damaged quantum suit and soaking uniform and into dry clothes, rummaging through the kitchen drawer for batteries and the portable radio. He catches the top of the news hour, a broadcast distorted with static. He feels the sound sink through his weary muscles to the bones that had held his body together even when it was smaller. There are few things that still feel safe and radio is one of them. 

Through the odd comfort of the familiar crackling comes an announcement, the date: Wednesday, May, 22nd. 2024. 

No. _No._

It must be a mistake, a hitch in the static. 

_Something is wrong._

Something has gone so awry, he doesn’t even know where to begin. 

He searches for purchase along the edge of the counter. His lungs vie for desperate breaths that don’t fit, swell his lungs and make his ribs crack with the weight. It’s too much and his legs fail and send him into a kneel on the floor. 

The universe seems to take and take and he can’t catch a break. 

He throws his head back against the cabinets and turns his face towards the heavens, towards the water-stained ceiling and begs for a soft landing. There’s never been a kind ending in his life, soft interludes, but always bad endings. 

Steve has been gone over a year since stepping onto the platform. 

He doesn’t know how to fix it. How to rewrite his ending, take the pen from the universe and forge his own. 

He closes his eyes, screws up his face.

_Is this a test?_

***

Nothing seems to faze the rhythm of people that play across the National Mall. Steve gathers his hood more tightly around his face, people still go about their business while his world seems to crumble down upon his impossibly exhausted shoulders. He’s tired, _so fucking tired._

A family snapping photographs of the distant monuments, a couple chatting idly beside the reflecting pool, a child calling towards the ducks floating on the surface. 

_Don’t they know?_

The world keeps spinning. The clouds keep moving. Steve’s world is just a small part of everyone else’s. His tragedy doesn’t even scuff the surface of their lives. 

Like a band breaking down, the music progressively becomes stranger. It becomes more painful to listen, screeching and off-key notes, but no one seems to notice but him. 

Just shy of the bend towards the Lincoln Memorial Bucky laps Sam, just as he does every morning while Steve watches from afar. He seems to float on the breeze carried by a wide grin and glowing in the morning sun. 

Bucky Barnes has lived without Steve Rogers one year and thirteen days. 

For a person that seem to wear loss and tragedy like a cloak, in those brief shining moments around the Mall, Bucky doesn’t seem to lack anything at all. 

It hurts, almost as badly as the first time he’d lost Bucky. Maybe worse, he’s close, so close he could step into his path and they could collide. Maybe it’s exactly like the first time and so many times after that, Bucky is within an arm’s length and Steve’s reach is just shy of saving him. 

There’s something there, appearing in quiet moments, a wound weeping just beneath the surface. Steve can see the blood, even if Bucky is desperately trying to keep it concealed. It’s a wound shaped like a broken promise. It catches in his smile, alters his walk, hangs on his shoulders. Steve had vowed just five seconds. 

He would do anything to make Bucky happy, to prove his promise, he would crawl on his hands and knees, slit his own throat with a steady hand if Bucky simply asked. He wants nothing more than to call across the insurmountable stretch of concrete, remind Bucky of that truth. 

Obligation clings like a weight at his ankles as he desperately tries to stay afloat, swim towards the other half of his soul. He has to untangle the mess, unfold the story and smooth the wrinkles before he can retire to love. No amount of time or adoration for another soul can change that about Steve Rogers. 

He watches Bucky disappear, grow into a speck on the horizon as he floats east towards the Washington Monument.

***

Sharon Carter is first to catch a mistaken note in the melody, the shrill and incoherent song that only Steve seems to hear. She realizes before Bucky and Sam, Steve thinks maybe because she’s looking, hasn’t given up hope. It’s never a forthright acknowledgment, never a confrontation, but she begins to scatter clues in her wake, snippets of the story that feel wrong.  


She occasionally glances behind her to see if they’re being collected, if her assumptions ring true, if Steve is really out there. 

Their silent alliance is elevated on a sunny afternoon when Steve takes to following her, quite literally, in a stolen car. He doesn’t hide his face, seek the refuge of shadows. Instead, he walks towards the light, her fingers drumming on the wheel and her face caught in the reflection of her rearview mirror. She sets an easy pace out of the heart of D.C. and he can swear she’s smiling, lips pulled up in something like vindication. 

West on Interstate 66 takes them through outer rings of suburbs, a series of turns and traffic lights spit them out upon an idyllic street. Sharon’s brake lights shine towards his windshield as she slows, their cars stuttering in the street. Nothing sparks recognition in the rows of neatly kept homes and well-groomed lawns. 

Just as his fingers twitch towards the car door and his thoughts and questions battle towards his tongue, Sharon’s gone. Her car ambles away from the place she has cut into a large piece of the puzzle. 

It doesn’t make sense at first. Nothing about this does. 

But Steve knows this: Millions of lives would’ve been lost without Sharon. Bucky’s blood would have painted Romanian pavement without Sharon. The web of deception spun into a nearly complete portrait may have succeeded too without Sharon.  


She helps him keep his most enduring promise to Bucky.

***

Someone or something had ensured Hydra would flourish in the adjacent timeline.

The lie was weak in every way but one: Sam Wilson had been given the shield. Steve Rogers, the real Steve Rogers, had been planning to do the same. 

The passing of the mantle holds the deceit together like glue.

***

The home Sharon had pointed him towards is suburbia gift wrapped with a neat bow, a horrifying extension of the exhibit at the Smithsonian. His entire life displayed in a bright caricature. This life he does not remember. Faded children and mistaken snapshots. The woman he recognizes, the woman he loved, but never like _this._ There’s nothing to indicate a tether to the life he had truly built, no radiant red and gold hair or gapped tooth grins, not a trace of grey eyes and a well-worn grin.

It was a life he had deliberately abstained from, a life he could’ve had in exchange for his coordinates. It was his _choice_ not to give them. 

This home, the photographs, the symbols of a false biography all indicate a festering infection. Hydra spreading and blossoming into the most putrid garden and he hadn’t stopped it. Bucky, the better half of him, had been left as nothing but mere collateral in the growing decades of chaos and Steve couldn’t even endure the suggestion of it. 

That was the worst injustice Steve could ever conceive of and Steve had practically stumbled from the womb with fists raised towards injustice. This would be excessively severe, no punishment would _ever_ fit the crime of harming Bucky Barnes, but Steve would tear the world apart to come close. 

In the parody of his existence, the imposter takes an intermission, asleep upstairs. The figure rests on the left side of the bed, leaving an absence on the right. It’s the most minuscule flaw that draws forth vast flames of rage and desperation at the base of his spine, climbs the ladder to animate his fists and curl his mouth into a snarl. Steve always slept on the right, Bucky on the left. That was them, that was theirs and that’s what had been taken by all the deception. 

The cracks in the story that this version of himself told leaves just enough room for Steve to sneak back in, to stride into the dim bedroom and illuminate it with blinding anger. 

He kneels at the bedside, a pose that mimics repentance on Sundays and quiet final moments with his mother. Now the kneel becomes a different kind of sacrament. 

A gun cocking, clouded eyes opening.

His own haggard face distorts with horror, an expression to quietly signify being found out, watching an empire crumble. The expression quickly gives into a leer. Cold and unaffected. 

“Who are you?” He adopts the voice that commanded troops towards victory, it only quivers slightly with fury, with fear. 

A futile effort, the imposter merely tips its head, eyes alight with something unspokenly wicked. 

He presses the muzzle of the gun further into its temple, reiterates his question. 

At the rough insistence of the barrel, his own voice asks, “you wouldn’t kill yourself, would you, Captain?” 

It’s Steve’s turn to grin wildly, bordering on sadistic, throw his head back in a fit of bitter laughter. If the figure before him truly shared his soul it would know he had ended his own life before. The loss of Bucky had brought him crashing into snowy plains of ocean. 

Killing the pretender would be much of the same, _for love._

He strikes the imposter, aiming to break his hands upon the old man’s face. 

“Guess you really don’t know me.”

He doesn’t give the imposter opportunity to respond, to weave further lies that are impossibly easy to unravel. He thumbs the safety of the gun back on, tucks it away to finish the job with his fists. Hands that held Bucky, hands that failed him, saved him, those hands would right this wrong. 

The imposter is not Steve. It may wear some iteration of his face but it doesn’t carry his soul, because any soul that ever animated Steve Rogers would follow Bucky Barnes to the ends of the earth, not run in the opposite direction.

The imposter’s neck gives easily beneath Steve’s hands and it isn’t even enough. 

Steve has committed countless inconceivable acts with Bucky’s name on his tongue and his face behind Steve’s eyelids, but none will come close to translating how Steve feels for him. He had severed his makeshift family, burned governments to flitting bits of ash, aimed a plane towards frigid waters to rejoin him somewhere, someplace. 

Now, he’s killed a creature that wears his own face with bare hands. 

_I don't know if I'm worth all this, Steve._

It was all worth it for Bucky Barnes.

***

Steve slips into Bucky’s apartment easily, like he was meant to be there, like some hushed part of Bucky had been waiting and hoping against all odds. Bucky had left a space in his life that was shaped like Steve, maybe not intentionally, but his soul had always left a bit of thread hanging to stitch them back together, again and again.

Murder is still fresh on his hands and impatience still carrying his feet. He would’ve crawled, dragged his bloody hands and knees from the white-picket-fence wrapped lie if it meant he could bleed beside Bucky. 

Bucky has built a quiet home out of stacks of books, tokens of humanity, bits of Steve that had been left behind. Drawings, clothing, any and all shared belongings. Almost another museum of Steve Rogers, but the best kind, a collective history written by a shared soul. 

It mirrors hovering in a home Bucky had built for himself in Bucharest, Steve assuming the role of a ghost and haunting the space. Again, he pages through notes and scrawling thoughts Bucky has committed to paper, he thinks about all the written manifestations of their affections lost to history, lost to time and secrecy. Some of the words storm off the page and into Steve’s heart, replacing the black ink with his blood. 

The moment the Winter Soldier’s mask came loose and Steve saw his face, saw the lack of light, had been the _most_ bittersweet moment of his entire life. He could taste it on his tongue, like the ghost of Bucky’s last kiss had resurfaced on his mouth. Standing in Bucky’s shadowy apartment, surrounded by the physical bits that made them, reading recollections of the heartbreak Steve had caused with his disappearance and subsequent replacement was a close second.

Steve reads until he can’t bear it, until he’s clinging to sheets that carry the vague scent of home. Until his knees threaten to give and send him careening into guilt. 

He waits there, like he’s left Bucky waiting for so long now. 

It’s a series of soft sounds, shoes treading the stairs, keys in the lock, the flutter of a jacket being tossed aside. It sounds so much like every home Steve has ever had and it hurts. Bucky is what made his homes. 

Steve hovers at the window he entered from, waiting in the darkness for his light. Like waiting in the shadows of a confessional booth every Sunday, guilt eating at his soul. 

When Bucky finally returns to his bedroom, returns to Steve, it begins as a fight. 

The first time Bucky touches him in the time he’s been lost is with violence, and isn’t that how it was always meant to be with them? 

Mistaken, misguided bloodshed that could only be remedied with an exchanging of promises. That in it itself tells Steve that maybe the universe has _finally_ been set to rights, if they’re exchanging blows before exchanging vows then maybe it’s going to be okay. They’re going to be okay. 

He doesn’t fight back, doesn’t even try to fend off the punches, just like their final moments upon the helicarrier, he spreads his arms wide and silently directs Bucky’s aim towards his heart. Because Bucky has always existed there anyway. 

Bucky’s fists at his face is the best feeling he can remember since he awoke on the banks of the river again. If Steve were to die by Bucky’s hand, he would die happy. He’s known that all along. He knows that with certainty as Bucky’s hand hits just shy of his bleeding heart. 

Bucky catches him, keeps him close with his golden forearm at his throat and Steve’s never needed air less. He can feel Bucky’s fingers bruise his shoulder, the plates of his arm brand his neck, he’s always belonged to Bucky in every shape they’ve taken. 

Bucky’s hold tightens, just slightly, just short of crushing Steve’s throat entirely. 

Steve Rogers’ last words were always meant to be something within the realm of “Do it, Buck.” 

When the realization slams into Bucky it nearly knocks him sideways, leaves him staggering. The rush of air back into Steve’s lungs feels like coming, dizzying and brilliant. He swells into Bucky, takes every little bit he can where his spine meets Bucky’s chest. 

“Let me see you.” He begs around that ominous feeling that always seizes his throat at the verge of tears. 

Bucky takes his right hand and reaches out and settles delicately on Steve’s arm, holding him together and turning Steve towards him until they’re breathing each other in. Steve touches every bit of Bucky that he can reach, keeps a steadying hand on his face. He says Bucky’s name until his voice is hoarse, vocal cords shaped irreparably into the name. 

“Buck, it’s me. It’s Steve. I’m so sorry. Come on, breathe.”

Steve is watching Bucky’s heart mend and it’s incredible, it’s absolution. 

Bucky’s eyes are wide with it, wide with the ideas he can’t swallow whole, can’t cram into his chest and make sense of. It doesn’t make sense to Steve either, what’s happened, where he went, so he settles for reminding him, “It’s me, Bucky.”

“How could you? How could you leave me?”

“I didn’t, I didn’t.”

For a moment he’s almost certain Bucky will hit him again, place his confusion and anger and heartbreak across Steve’s face. He kisses him instead. It’s bruising, messy and fervent, just like them. 

He keeps his promise after all, _“I’ll always come back for you.”_

Time has got it in for them. From bargaining for frail breaths to beating the life, but not the love, out of their bodies. For all the instances time took Bucky from Steve, it’s matched with one attempt at taking Steve from Bucky. Every attempt has failed, including the last.

**Epilogue**

The sun has nearly been swallowed by the horizon, giving over into a bright orange hue that illuminates the sky and makes the evening feel warm in Steve’s bones. 

He keeps pace with Sam this time as they follow tracks foraged around the Mall years before. Closing the circle as they come back around through time, Steve pauses at the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. The rosy light makes the water gleam gold. All the best things in Steve’s life have a gold hue. 

He calls softly towards Sam, who seems to take the gleaming light of the Tidal Basin and hold it inside himself, “Hey.” 

Sam turns towards him and a giddy feeling flourishes in Steve’s stomach. He’s finally here. They’re finally here. “You’re meant to have it, you know.”

“Have what?”

“The shield.” 

Sam studies him, that sincere, knowing expression on his brow that had broken right through the walls Steve had tactfully built a decade before. 

“It’s yours. I mean it, Sam.”

It had been a puzzle, bits of jigsaw scattered and left to assemble. Some of the pieces had not fit, been tossed away in violence and sacrifice, but the one piece that had always fit perfectly was Sam carrying on the mantle. 

Sam’s mouth wavers somewhere between a grin and a frown, “and you?” 

“What about me?” 

“What’re you gonna do?”

A pause. A brilliant realization.

“Remember when you asked me what made me happy?” Sam nods in earnest. “I know now.”

**Author's Note:**

> wow!! I actually did it!!
> 
> this is a follow up to and i'll wait for you, as if i'm waiting for a storm to stop, but it could be read as a stand alone! I couldn’t stop thinking about tackling the story I had written from Steve’s perspective. so yanno, if you wanted to read it again but slightly different you’re in luck!!
> 
> thank you for reading and thank you for such lovely responses to the first story, it means the world!! 
> 
> find me on [tumblr](https://godfreysroman.tumblr.com/)


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